Compassionate Obsolescence: Coping with Technological Change

Speaker 1

Carl Youngblood serves as Director and Webmaster in the Mormon Transhumanist Association. He’s worked professionally as a software engineer for over 15 years and is currently employed by Cisco Systems in Oslo, Norway. Carl served an LDS mission in Brazil from 1994 to 96 and received a BA in Portuguese from BYU. And an MS in computer science from the University of Washington. He’s married to Cami Allred and is the father of four children. He’s an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and enjoys reading. Theology, philosophy, singing, and playing various musical instruments, and he will now speak to us on compassionate obsolescence coping with technological change.

Carl Youngblood

All around us, people are becoming increasingly alarmed at the pace of technological change. A wide range of jobs are being automated and outsourced. Even those at the forefront of technological innovation find it hard to keep up. Despite its challenges, this era also presents us with unprecedented opportunities, as various barriers to entry are lowered in education and other economic sectors. How do we navigate these challenges and opportunities successfully?

Carl Youngblood

Perhaps we can begin by looking back. If you were to choose the most definitive characteristic of humanness, what would it be? Rather than a specific set of activities, appearances, clothing, or tools, we might say that humans, more than anything else, have sought for mastery. excellence, to push beyond their present boundaries and do things better than before. They were humans in transition. They were transhumans. This drive has been manifest ever since our ancestors first began using tools, and continues unabated today. It is at the heart of transhumanism.

Carl Youngblood

This process of improving on our existing tools takes many forms and is often marked by social upheaval. In seventeen seventy nine, Ned Ludd led a group of workers, the so-called Luddites, to destroy several stocking frames that they considered a threat to their jobs as artisans. Similar violent reactions occurred in other disrupted industries.

Carl Youngblood

Another common reaction to change is alarmism and sensationalism, especially in relation to vital social institutions. There was initial resistance to electrified homes due to the possibility that it would make women and children vulnerable to predators who could see if they were home at night. Others threatened that women were simply not designed for railroad travel and that speeds in excess of fifty miles per hour could cause their uteruses to detach.

Carl Youngblood

Technology has also been the instrument of political change. Gutenberg’s printing press was an essential enabler of the Protestant Reformation. The fax machine contributed to the downfall of Soviet Russia. Some have argued that the so called Arab Spring was caused largely by widespread Internet access.

Carl Youngblood

In addition to making many tasks easier, technological advances have given us more leisure time. Clay Shirke calls this the cognitive surplus and notes that each generation has had trouble dealing with all this extra time. For example, the unprecedented levels of alcoholism and its attendant evils during the gin craze of the eighteenth century were not an original problem, but a reaction to it, specifically dramatic social change and the inability of the contemporary civic models to adapt to it.

Carl Youngblood

Today, we are faced with similar challenges to previous generations, but they are exacerbated by the accelerating pace of technological change. There’s not enough time to give a laundry list, so I’d like to highlight what I believe is perhaps the factor that contributes most. in the current phase of accelerating change. That is the rise of general purpose computation and a concept called Moore’s Law.

Carl Youngblood

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed that the amount of circuitry that engineers could fit into a given space was doubling about every two years. This process has continued unabated since then and has now come to govern the whole computing industry. And this exponential progress in computation is having and will continue to have a profound impact on all aspects of society.

Carl Youngblood

By the end of the decade, the average computer will have roughly the computational capacity of the human brain. That’s impressive, but the power of exponential growth really kicks in if you wait a couple more decades. At the current rate of progress, by twenty forty five, the average computer will have roughly the same computational capacity as all the brains in the entire world combined, and they will be everywhere in your pocket, in your appliances, vehicles, even in your body.

Carl Youngblood

Problems in biology and other sciences that currently take vast clusters of computers many days and even years to solve. will be solved by these computers in seconds. It can hardly be overstated how much this will change our world. Though we can barely predict the impact of these changes, such examples at least help us to acquire the necessary prerequisites of awe and concern over what we face.

Carl Youngblood

Let’s briefly discuss some of the challenges that these changes are causing and will continue to cause. Paul Graham points out the technological progress also tends to optimize the addictiveness of things we like. It’s happening all around us. We can’t stop checking our Facebook In fact, James has been doing it the entire conference. I’ve been worried that you haven’t been listening well enough. Or our email. We have to watch the latest episode of American Idol or check the score of the game.

Carl Youngblood

Clay Shirky claims that T V has replaced gin as the focus of our cognitive surplus, and he points out that all the information on Wikipedia an invaluable resource curated entirely by amateur volunteers, required only five per cent of the time Americans spend watching T V in a single year. Can you think of how productive we would be if we stopped watching T V and started contributing to the world around us?

Carl Youngblood

Industries are being rendered obsolete by software, leaving workers with irrelevant skills. Other industries have encountered have outsourced more and more of their processes. until before they knew it, all they had left was a brand. This happened to Dell. These missteps and disruptions mean lost jobs, or more precisely, migrations from some industries to others.

Carl Youngblood

So how do we handle all of this? There is not enough time to provide a comprehensive list, and I admit that my list will focus more heavily on knowledge workers, but I will try to also share some general coping strategies.

Carl Youngblood

One technique that has always served us well are better tools. The knowledge worker of today has to process more information than ever before. So the tools she uses need to be adapted to this new reality.

Carl Youngblood

For those of you who are dealing with information overload and addictiveness, an excellent new reference is Clay A. Johnson’s Information Diet. This is a book. This is the cover of the book, okay? Which is full of techniques and suggested programs for helping you become more productive and healthier. about how you consume information. It’s really good. I’m in the middle of it right now. Another excellent reference is Getting Things Done by David Allen.

Carl Youngblood

For example, you can use tools like Sanebox to help you filter and prioritize your email. RSS Readers are a great way of processing your most important sources of information more quickly. Twitter lists are a great way of focusing on the most important news and information related to your profession and avoiding distractions. Rescue Time is another tool that can help you track how long you spend in different applications and analyze your behavior patterns to help you improve your work habits.

Carl Youngblood

I haven’t yet put this together, but I’ll try to include Posted the list or something, a list of like all the links of these various things so you guys can get them and check them out.

Carl Youngblood

Accelerating change means that no job is safe for long. Today’s workers should expect to experience significant changes in profession during their lifetimes, especially if they live forever. Education will be increasingly important, and fortunately, great things are happening here.

Carl Youngblood

MIT offers a wide variety of its courses online in a format where you can watch video lectures, follow along with the homework. take exams and even get assistance from a TA, all for free. Stanford, UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan have joined an initiative called Course Sera. offering similar courses. These are top notch courses from some of the best universities in the world.

Carl Youngblood

A wide variety of free learning options are available on Apple’s iTunes U. Entirely new online universities like Udacity are also innovating in this space. Other sites like Khan Academy will teach you everything from basic math to advanced calculus as well as history, chemistry, biology and other subjects.

Carl Youngblood

One area where the demand for jobs is especially high right now is software engineering. And there are entire sites dedicated to teaching it to you. free in a step-by-step way, starting from scratch. Code Academy is one of them. There’s also Treehouse and Code School. There’s such a high demand for engineers right now that Living Social’s Hungry Academy will even pay you while you learn how to code with their experts, and then give you the opportunity for a full time job.

Carl Youngblood

There are plenty of resources for many other professions also. Stack Exchange and other community forums are making it possible for professionals and amateurs alike to collaborate and learn from each other. If you still haven’t mastered the basics, take a free hands-on workshop at the Apple Store or a summer course at your local community college.

Carl Youngblood

New services are becoming available that make it easier than ever to start a business or to do work in more efficient ways. Services like Square and Stripe allow you to accept credit cards without the hassle of setting up a merchant account. with much simpler fee structures and very competitive rates. Telepresence technologies like Skype allow you to work with customers anywhere in the world. And cloud based hosting services like Heroku allow you to deploy a scale on demand website or application in seconds without having to worry about managing a costly IT infrastructure.

Carl Youngblood

I realize that as I address this audience, for the most part, I’m preaching to the choir, to people who already are working hard to stay abreast of new trends. But it’s also necessary for those of us who are aware of these things to give back to the community. which ultimately benefits us all. Tools like Skype, Remote Desktop and CrossLoop can make it easier for you to help your less tech savvy relatives with computer problems or training.

Carl Youngblood

Rather than wait for industry or the public sector to fix things, grassroots movements are cropping up all over the place where passionate amateurs are bypassing the status quo.

Carl Youngblood

In only a few years, the DIY BioCommunity, a group of amateur biologists mostly working from home, has already created a database of over 5,000 different bio bricks. Think of them as Legos except made out of DNA.

Carl Youngblood

The so-called maker movement is made up of local groups of hardware enthusiasts and tinkerers, everything from electrical engineers to machinists. who get together to build useful gadgets and talk shop. Annual maker fairs across the country attract thousands of attendees. Many of their inventions are competitive with commercial options but costs something like three hundred dollars instead of three hundred thousand dollars.

Carl Youngblood

P2P lending sites like Kiva are making it possible for you and me to help entrepreneurs in the developing world lift themselves out of poverty. By 2009, the site had over 180,000 entrepreneurs receiving $1 million in loans per week, and the repayment rate is over 98%.

Carl Youngblood

One thing that I want to make clear in summary is my firm belief that despite challenges, things are getting better. This is not a zero sum game. When we improve how we do things, the things humans value increase in abundance. Despite scattered pockets of turmoil, overall violence has dropped dramatically from prior eras and continues to do so. Better communication and utilization of our resources ultimately results in more equality, more happiness and more abundance as we grow closer to the ideal community we strive for.

Carl Youngblood

And the LORD called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness, and there was no poor among them.

Carl Youngblood

Thank you. Questions? Yeah.

Speaker 3

You spoke about how new technologies are replacing a lot of jobs. Yeah. And as well as there’s a lot of free resources. That are out there as well. And my question is do those also contribute to the job loss effect of new technology?

Carl Youngblood

What I’ve found in my profession is that all these new tools are doing is like multiplying the need for more programmers. Honestly, we haven’t reached a point yet where where our jobs are being obviated and rendered obsolete. But what’s happening is there’s just more and more churn in the marketplace where things are jobs are switching around a lot faster than they were before. But if anything, we’re seeing like more of a need for human ingenuity than we were before. which is fascinating. I mean, that might change in the future when we reach a point where we really get artificial intelligence. But at the moment, it’s just there’s a massive demand. I mean, we have unemployment in our country. It’s really high in certain industries. But like the demand for programmers has never been higher than it is now. I’m sorry that my talk is really programmer centric, but that’s my profession. But I think that that’s true in other professions as well. I see like there’s always a need for skilled artisans. The tools, the way they do things might be different. There’s a need for good woodworkers doing awesome jobs, cabinetry or whatever. There’s always a need for that kind of stuff. Yes.

Speaker 4

I’ve got a question. So if we look back to the past, like you’ve mentioned the Luddites, they have these people that are doing jobs that were To a large extent, replaced by machinery, right? And they fought against that. And today, in general, it’s not the smart guys that are going and pounding out sheets of metal to go and bolt them onto a car or something. The number of assembly jobs are going down still, right? So what do we do for people who may not be able to acquire the skills for this more modern economy. And then another follow up question, that would be is it possible that in the future, these jobs that we have now that require smart people could also be replaced by smart robots?

Carl Youngblood

Yes. So first question Really, I mean, I struggled as I wrote this whole talk because I realized that like these solutions that I’m providing are useful and helpful, but they’re certainly not adequate. I mean, there’s so much of a need for so much more. we have a lot of segments of society that are probably not going to be taking my advice here that I gave today. and what to do about those people who are like deliberately or just through various other reasons unable to keep up. And I don’t think that we can I don’t think we’re powerful enough as a culture and society to really accommodate all of these problems, but I do think that That’s why I did want to at least put a section in my talk about compassion and helping others who haven’t made it that far yet. And for me, the main it mostly boils down to willingness. Like if someone refuses to enter the modern world, I can’t I’m not going to force them into it. And some people, that’s going to be the case. I mean, I’ve read some sci-fi books about like societies where there’s certain segments of the population who are just like given like food and whatever it is that they really enjoy doing and that’s it. But the abundance of the future, I think, that we’re developing now will allow us to take care of those segments of the population more easily. as well.

Carl Youngblood

And the second part of the question was about our modern job our more advanced jobs. And I think that’s possible that, that could happen. And there have been a couple I didn’t have time to get into it today, but there have been a couple of recent articles about how like jobs will become obsolete in the future, jobs themselves, because there will be such an abundance of labor saving devices and things that we will be able to spend more time like philosophizing and making art and stuff like that, which I think would be really fun too. So we will at some point have to address these issues more radically than I’ve discussed today. It’s hard to predict how that’s going to look. So yes.